With much of America preoccupied with the Super Bowl this weekend, movie theaters across the country were pretty dead. Fitting, then, that a zombie flick should take the box office crown.
Warm Bodies, an undead romcom, lurched to the top of the podium, shuffling to an estimated $19.5 million worth of grayish-green bills. Sure, it’s not the sort of weekend take that’ll thrill or frighten most studio insiders. but for the perennial room-temperature weekend that surrounds Super Bowl Sunday, Warm Bodies looked positively lively. And it’s not as if it had (ahem) stiff competition.
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, last week’s champ, could only muster half the take of Warm Bodies—proving that this brother-and-sister extermination squad doesn’t have a handle on hunting the walking dead just yet. The Grimm duo banked $9.2 million worth of gingerbread to edge Silver Linings Playbook (which snagged $8.1 mil) for second place.
Two more holdovers, Mama and Zero Dark Thirty, rounded out the top five. Mama collected $6.7 million to solidify fourth place, while Zero Dark Thirty hunted down $5.3 million for fifth.
Before we go, perhaps we should offer a bit of a eulogy for Sylvester Stallone’s career. Sure, the dude’s still as muscular as ever and his Expendables franchise still seems to be ticking along. But his latest solo project—Bullet to the Head—was given a quick death at the multiplex. It earned just $4.5 million, the second-lowest opening-weekend gross in the action star’s career (just behind 1981’s Nighthawks).
Final figures update: 1. Warm Bodies, $20.4 million; 2. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, $9.4 million; 3. Silver Linings Playbook, $7.7 million; 4. Mama, $6.6 million; 5. Zero Dark Thirty, $5.2 million.
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